Modern Italian Poets
by
W. D. Howells

Part 1 out of 6

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MODERN ITALIAN POETS

ESSAYS AND VERSIONS

BY

W. D. HOWELLS

WITH PORTRAITS

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION

ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS

GIUSEPPE PARINI

VITTORIO ALFIERI

VINCENZO MONTI

UGO FOSCOLO

ALESSANDRO MANZONI

SILVIO PELLICO

TOMMASO GROSSI

LUIGI CARRER

GIOVANNI BERCHET

GIAMBATTISTA NICCOLINI

GIACOMO LEOPARDI

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI

FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARO

GIOVANNI PRATI

ALEARDO ALEARDI

GIULIO CARCANO

ARNALDO FUSINATO

LUIGI MERCANTINI

CONCLUSION

PORTRAITS.

VITTORIO ALFIERI

VINCENZO MONTI

UGO FOSCOLO

ALESSANDRO MANZONI

TOMMASO GROSSI

GIAMBATTISTA NICCOLINI

GIACOMO LEOPARDI

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI

FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARO

GIOVANNI PRATI

ALEARDO ALEARDI

INTRODUCTION

This book has grown out of studies begun twenty years ago in Italy,
and continued fitfully, as I found the mood and time for them, long
after their original circumstance had become a pleasant memory. If any
one were to say that it did not fully represent the Italian poetry
of the period which it covers chronologically, I should applaud his
discernment; and perhaps I should not contend that it did much more
than indicate the general character of that poetry. At the same time,
I think that it does not ignore any principal name among the Italian
poets of the great movement which resulted in the national freedom and
unity, and it does form a sketch, however slight and desultory, of the
history of Italian poetry during the hundred years ending in 1870.

Since that time, literature has found in Italy the scientific and
realistic development which has marked it in all other countries. The
romantic school came distinctly to a close there with the close of the
long period of patriotic aspiration and endeavor; but I do not know
the more recent work, except in some of the novels, and I have not
attempted to speak of the newer poetry represented by Carducci. The
translations here are my own; I have tried to make them faithful; I am
sure they are careful.

Possibly I should not offer my book to the public at all if I knew of
another work in English studying even with my incoherence the Italian
poetry of the time mentioned, or giving a due impression of its
extraordinary solidarity. It forms part of the great intellectual
movement of which the most unmistakable signs were the French
revolution, and its numerous brood of revolutions, of the first,
second, and third generations, throughout Europe; but this poetry is
unique in the history of literature for the unswerving singleness of
its tendency.

The boundaries of epochs are very obscure, and of course the poetry of
the century closing in 1870 has much in common with earlier Italian
poetry. Parini did not begin it, nor Alfieri; it began them, and its
spirit must have been felt in the perfumed air of the soft Lorrainese
despotism at Florence when Filicaja breathed over his native land the
sigh which makes him immortal. Yet finally, every age is individual;
it has a moment of its own when its character has ceased to be
general, and has not yet begun to be general, and it is one of these
moments which is eternized in the poetry before us. It was, perhaps,
more than any other poetry in the world, an incident and an instrument
of the political redemption of the people among whom it arose.
"In free and tranquil countries," said the novelist Guerrazzi in
conversation with M. Monnier, the sprightly Swiss critic, recently
dead, who wrote so much and so well about modern Italian literature,
"men have the happiness and the right to be artists for art's sake:
with us, this would be weakness and apathy. When I write it is because
I have something _to do_; my books are not productions, but deeds.
Before all, here in Italy we must be men. When we have not the
sword, we must take the pen. We heap together materials for building
batteries and fortresses, and it is our misfortune if these structures
are not works of art. To write slowly, coldly, of our times and of our
country, with the set purpose of creating a _chef-d'oeuvre_, would be
almost an impiety. When I compose a book, I think only of freeing my
soul, of imparting my idea or my belief. As vehicle, I choose the form
of romance, since it is popular and best liked at this day; my picture
is my thoughts, my doubts, or my dreams. I begin a story to draw the
crowd; when I feel that I have caught its ear, I say what I have
to say; when I think the lesson is growing tiresome, I take up the
anecdote again; and whenever I can leave it, I go back to my
moralizing. Detestable aesthetics, I grant you; my works of siege will
be destroyed after the war, I don't doubt; but what does it matter?"

II

The political purpose of literature in Italy had become conscious long
before Guerrazzi's time; but it was the motive of poetry long before
it became conscious. When Alfieri, for example, began to write, in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century, there was no reason to suppose
that the future of Italy was ever to differ very much from its past.
Italian civilization had long worn a fixed character, and Italian
literature had reflected its traits; it was soft, unambitious,
elegant, and trivial. At that time Piedmont had a king whom she loved,
but not that free constitution which she has since shared with
the whole peninsula. Lombardy had lapsed from Spanish to Austrian
despotism; the Republic of Venice still retained a feeble hold upon
her wide territories of the main-land, and had little trouble in
drugging any intellectual aspiration among her subjects with the
sensual pleasures of her capital. Tuscany was quiet under the
Lorrainese dukes who had succeeded the Medici; the little states of
Modena and Parma enjoyed each its little court and its little Bourbon
prince, apparently without a dream of liberty; the Holy Father ruled
over Bologna, Ferrara, Ancona, and all the great cities and towns of
the Romagna; and Naples was equally divided between the Bourbons and
the bandits. There seemed no reason, for anything that priests or
princes of that day could foresee, why this state of things should not
continue indefinitely; and it would be a long story to say just why it
did not continue. What every one knows is that the French revolution
took place, that armies of French democrats overran all these languid
lordships and drowsy despotisms, and awakened their subjects, more or
less willingly or unwillingly, to a sense of the rights of man, as
Frenchmen understood them, and to the approach of the nineteenth
century. The whole of Italy fell, directly or indirectly, under French
sway; the Piedmontese and Neapolitan kings were driven away, as were
the smaller princes of the other states; the Republic of Venice ceased
to be, and the Pope became very much less a prince, if not more a
priest, than he had been for a great many ages. In due time French
democracy passed into French imperialism, and then French imperialism
passed altogether away; and so after 1815 came the Holy Alliance with
its consecrated contrivances for fettering mankind. Lombardy, with
all Venetia, was given to Austria; the dukes of Parma, of Modena, and
Tuscany were brought back and propped up on their thrones again. The
Bourbons returned to Naples, and the Pope's temporal glory and power
were restored to him. This condition of affairs endured, with more
or less disturbance from the plots of the Carbonari and many other
ineffectual aspirants and conspirators, until 1848, when, as we know,
the Austrians were driven out, as well as the Pope and the various
princes small and great, except the King of Sardinia, who not only
gave a constitution to his people, but singularly kept the oath
he swore to support it. The Pope and the other princes, even the
Austrians, had given constitutions and sworn oaths, but their memories
were bad, and their repute for veracity was so poor that they were not
believed or trusted. The Italians had then the idea of freedom and
independence, but not of unity, and their enemies easily broke, one
at a time, the power of states which, even if bound together, could
hardly have resisted their attack. In a little while the Austrians
were once more in Milan and Venice, the dukes and grand-dukes in their
different places, the Pope in Rome, the Bourbons in Naples, and all
was as if nothing had been, or worse than nothing, except in Sardinia,
where the constitution was still maintained, and the foundations of
the present kingdom of Italy were laid. Carlo Alberto had abdicated on
that battle-field where an Austrian victory over the Sardinians sealed
the fate of the Italian states allied with him, and his son, Victor
Emmanuel, succeeded him. As to what took place ten years later, when
the Austrians were finally expelled from Lombardy, and the transitory
sovereigns of the duchies and of Naples flitted for good, and the
Pope's dominion was reduced to the meager size it kept till 1871, and
the Italian states were united under one constitutional king--I need
not speak.

In this way the governments of Italy had been four times wholly
changed, and each of these changes was attended by the most marked
variations in the intellectual life of the people; yet its general
tendency always continued the same.

III

The longing for freedom is the instinct of self-preservation in
literature; and, consciously or unconsciously, the Italian poets of
the last hundred years constantly inspired the Italian people with
ideas of liberty and independence. Of course the popular movements
affected literature in turn; and I should by no means attempt to
say which had been the greater agency of progress. It is not to be
supposed that a man like Alfieri, with all his tragical eloquence
against tyrants, arose singly out of a perfectly servile society. His
time was, no doubt, ready for him, though it did not seem so; but, on
the other hand, there is no doubt that he gave not only an utterance
but a mighty impulse to contemporary thought and feeling. He was in
literature what the revolution was in politics, and if hardly any
principle that either sought immediately to establish now stands, it
is none the less certain that the time had come to destroy what they
overthrew, and that what they overthrew was hopelessly vicious.

In Alfieri the great literary movement came from the north, and by far
the larger number of the writers of whom I shall have to speak were
northern Italians. Alfieri may represent for us the period of time
covered by the French democratic conquests. The principal poets under
the Italian governments of Napoleon during the first twelve years
of this century were Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo--the former a
Ferrarese by birth and the latter a Greco-Venetian. The literary as
well as the political center was then Milan, and it continued to be so
for many years after the return of the Austrians, when the so-called
School of Resignation nourished there. This epoch may be most
intelligibly represented by the names of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, and
Tommaso Grossi--all Lombards. About 1830 a new literary life began
to be felt in Florence under the indifferentism or toleration of the
grand-dukes. The chiefs of this school were Giacomo Leopardi;
Giambattista Niccolini, the author of certain famous tragedies of
political complexion; Guerrazzi, the writer of a great number of
revolutionary romances; and Giuseppe Giusti, a poet of very marked and
peculiar powers, and perhaps the greatest political satirist of the
century. The chief poets of a later time were Aleardo Aleardi, a
Veronese; Giovanni Prati, who was born in the Trentino, near the
Tyrol; and Francesco Dall Ongaro, a native of Trieste. I shall mention
all these and others particularly hereafter, and I have now only named
them to show how almost entirely the literary life of militant Italy
sprang from the north. There were one or two Neapolitan poets of less
note, among whom was Gabriele Rossetti, the father of the English
Rossettis, now so well known in art and literature.

IV

In dealing with this poetry, I naturally seek to give its universal
and aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political
quality; for I should not hope to interest any one else in what I had
myself often found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political
satire and invective are not relished best in free countries. No
danger attends their exercise; there is none of the charm of secrecy
or the pleasure of transgression in their production; there is no
special poignancy to free administrations in any one of ten thousand
assaults upon them; the poets leave this sort of thing mostly to the
newspapers. Besides, we have not, so to speak, the grounds that such
a long-struggling people as the Italians had for the enjoyment of
patriotic poetry. As an average American, I have found myself very
greatly embarrassed when required, by Count Alfieri, for example, to
hate tyrants. Of course I do hate them in a general sort of way; but
having never seen one, how is it possible for me to feel any personal
fury toward them? When the later Italian poets ask me to loathe spies
and priests I am equally at a loss. I can hardly form the idea of a
spy, of an agent of the police, paid to haunt the steps of honest
men, to overhear their speech, and, if possible, entrap them into a
political offense. As to priests--well, yes, I suppose they are bad,
though I do not know this from experience; and I find them generally
upon acquaintance very amiable. But all this was different with the
Italians: they had known, seen, and felt tyrants, both foreign and
domestic, of every kind; spies and informers had helped to make
their restricted lives anxious and insecure; and priests had leagued
themselves with the police and the oppressors until the Church, which
should have been kept a sacred refuge from all the sorrows and wrongs
of the world, became the most dreadful of its prisons. It is no wonder
that the literature of these people should have been so filled with
the patriotic passion of their life; and I am not sure that literature
is not as nobly employed in exciting men to heroism and martyrdom for
a great cause as in the purveyance of mere intellectual delights. What
it was in Italy when it made this its chief business we may best learn
from an inquiry that I have at last found somewhat amusing. It will
lead us over vast meadows of green baize enameled with artificial
flowers, among streams that do nothing but purl. In this region the
shadows are mostly brown, and the mountains are invariably horrid;
there are tumbling floods and sighing groves; there are naturally
nymphs and swains; and the chief business of life is to be in love
and not to be in love; to burn and to freeze without regard to the
mercury. Need I say that this region is Arcady?

ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS

One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of
ladies and gentlemen--mostly poets and poetesses according to their
thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of
Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and
picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an
ode with the sweet patience of their race,--for they were all
Italians,--it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here
was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had
been flattered. There had been reading and praising of odes and
sonnets the whole blessed afternoon, and now he cried out to the
complaisant, canorous company, "Behold Arcadia revived in us!"

This struck everybody at once by its truth. It struck, most of all, a
certain Giovan Maria Crescimbeni, honored in his day and despised in
ours as a poet and critic. He was of a cold, dull temperament; "a mind
half lead, half wood", as one Italian writer calls him; but he was an
inveterate maker of verses, and he was wise in his own generation. He
straightway proposed to the tuneful _abbes, cavalieri serventi_, and
_precieuses_, who went singing and love-making up and down Italy in
those times, the foundation of a new academy, to be called the Academy
of the Arcadians.

Literary academies were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of
the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque,
such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or
The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray,
The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the
production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think
of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of
the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of
the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous
academy in Milan, they placed in the chair a child just able to talk;
a question was proposed, and the answer of the child, whatever it was,
was held by one side to solve the problem, and the debates, _pro_ and
_con_, followed upon this point. Other academies in other cities had
other follies; but whatever the absurdity, it was encouraged alike by
Church and State, and honored by all the great world. The governments
of Italy in that day, whether lay or clerical, liked nothing so well
as to have the intellectual life of the nation squandered in the
trivialities of the academies--in their debates about nothing, their
odes and madrigals and masks and sonnets; and the greatest politeness
you could show a stranger was to invite him to a sitting of your
academy; to be furnished with a letter to the academy in the next city
was the highest favor you could ask for yourself.

In literature, the humorous Bernesque school had passed; Tasso had
long been dead; and the Neapolitan Marini, called the Corrupter of
Italian poetry, ruled from his grave the taste of the time. This
taste was so bad as to require a very desperate remedy, and it was
professedly to counteract it that the Academy of the Arcadians had
arisen.

The epoch was favorable, and, as Emiliani-Giudici (whom we shall
follow for the present) teaches, in his History of Italian Literature,
the idea of Crescimbeni spread electrically throughout Italy. The
gayest of the finest ladies and gentlemen the world ever saw, the
_illustrissimi_ of that polite age, united with monks, priests,
cardinals, and scientific thinkers in establishing the Arcadia; and
even popes and kings were proud to enlist in the crusade for the true
poetic faith. In all the chief cities Arcadian colonies were formed,
"dependent upon the Roman Arcadia, as upon the supreme Arch-Flock",
and in three years the Academy numbered thirteen hundred members,
every one of whom had first been obliged to give proof that he was a
good poet. They prettily called themselves by the names of shepherds
and shepherdesses out of Theocritus, and, being a republic, they
refused to own any earthly prince or ruler, but declared the Baby
Jesus to be the Protector of Arcadia. Their code of laws was written
in elegant Latin by a grave and learned man, and inscribed upon
tablets of marble.

According to one of the articles, the Academicians must study to
reproduce the customs of the ancient Arcadians and the character of
their poetry; and straightway "Italy was filled on every hand with
Thyrsides, Menalcases, and Meliboeuses, who made their harmonious
songs resound the names of their Chlorises, their Phyllises, their
Niceas; and there was poured out a deluge of pastoral compositions",
some of them by "earnest thinkers and philosophical writers, who were
not ashamed to assist in sustaining that miserable literary vanity
which, in the history of human thought, will remain a lamentable
witness to the moral depression of the Italian nation." As a pattern
of perfect poetizing, these artless nymphs and swains chose Constanzo,
a very fair poet of the sixteenth century. They collected his verse,
and printed it at the expense of the Academy; and it was established
without dissent that each Arcadian in turn, at the hut of some
conspicuous shepherd, in the presence of the keeper (such was the
jargon of those most amusing unrealities), should deliver a commentary
upon some sonnet of Constanzo. As for Crescimbeni, who declared that
Arcadia was instituted "strictly for the purpose of exterminating bad
taste and of guarding against its revival, pursuing it continually,
wherever it should pause or lurk, even to the most remote and
unconsidered villages and hamlets"--Crescimbeni could not do less than
write four dialogues, as he did, in which he evolved from four of
Constanzo's sonnets all that was necessary for Tuscan lyric poetry.

"Thus," says Emiliani-Giudici, referring to the crusading intent of
Crescimbeni, "the Arcadians were a sect of poetical Sanfedista, who,
taking for example the zeal and performance of San Domingo de Gruzman,
proposed to renew in literature the scenes of the Holy Office among
the Albigenses. Happily, the fire of Arcadian verse did not really
burn! The institution was at first derided, then it triumphed and
prevailed in such fame and greatness that, shining forth like a
new sun, it consumed the splendor of the lesser lights of heaven,
eclipsing the glitter of all those academies--the Thunderstruck, the
Extravagant, the Humid, the Tipsy, the Imbeciles, and the like--which
had hitherto formed the glory of the Peninsula."

I

Giuseppe Torelli, a charming modern Italian writer, in a volume called
_Paessaggi e Profili_ (Landscapes and Profiles), makes a study of
Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, one of the most famous of the famous Arcadian
shepherds; and from this we may learn something of the age and society
in which such a folly could not only be possible but illustrious. The
patriotic Italian critics and historians are apt to give at least a
full share of blame to foreign rulers for the corruption of their
nation, and Signor Torelli finds the Spanish domination over a vast
part of Italy responsible for the degradation of Italian mind and
manners in the seventeenth century. He declares that, because of the
Spaniards, the Italian theater was then silent, "or filled with the
noise of insipid allegories"; there was little or no education among
the common people; the slender literature that survived existed solely
for the amusement and distinction of the great; the army and the
Church were the only avenues of escape from obscurity and poverty; all
classes were sunk in indolence.

The social customs were mostly copied from France, except that purely
Italian invention, the _cavaliere servente_, who was in great vogue.
But there were everywhere in the cities coteries of fine ladies,
called _preziose_, who were formed upon the French _precieuses_
ridiculed by Moliere, and were, I suppose, something like what is
called in Boston demi-semi-literary ladies--ladies who cultivated
alike the muses and the modes. The preziose held weekly receptions at
their houses, and assembled poets and cavaliers from all quarters,
who entertained the ladies with their lampoons and gallantries, their
madrigals and gossip, their sonnets and their repartees. "Little by
little the poets had the better of the cavaliers: a felicitous rhyme
was valued more than an elaborately constructed compliment." And this
easy form of literature became the highest fashion. People hastened to
call themselves by the sentimental pastoral names of the Arcadians,
and almost forgot their love-intrigues so much were they absorbed in
the production and applause of "toasts, epitaphs for dogs, verses on
wagers, epigrams on fruits, on Echo, on the Marchioness's canaries, on
the Saints. These were read here and repeated there, declaimed in
the public resorts and on the promenades", and gravely studied and
commented on. A strange and surprising jargon arose, the utterance of
the feeblest and emptiest affectation. "In those days eyes were not
eyes, but pupils; not pupils, but orbs; not orbs, but the Devil knows
what," says Signor Torelli, losing patience. It was the golden age
of pretty words; and as to the sense of a composition, good society
troubled itself very little about that. Good society expressed itself
in a sort of poetical gibberish, "and whoever had said, for example,
Muses instead of Castalian Divinities, would have passed for a lowbred
person dropped from some mountain village. Men of fine mind, rich
gentlemen of leisure, brilliant and accomplished ladies, had resolved
that the time was come to lose their wits academically."

II

In such a world Arcadia nourished; into such a world that illustrious
shepherd, Carlo Innocenze Frugoni, was born. He was the younger son of
a noble family of Genoa, and in youth was sent into a cloister as a
genteel means of existence rather than from regard to his own wishes
or fitness. He was, in fact, of a very gay and mundane temper, and
escaped from his monastery as soon as ever he could, and spent his
long life thereafter at the comfortable court of Parma, where he sang
with great constancy the fortunes of varying dynasties and celebrated
in his verse all the polite events of society. Of course, even a life
so pleasant as this had its little pains and mortifications; and it is
history that when, in 1731, the last duke of the Farnese family died,
leaving a widow, "Frugoni predicted and maintained in twenty-five
sonnets that she would yet give an heir to the duke; but in spite
of the twenty-five sonnets the affair turned out otherwise, and the
extinction of the house of Farnese was written."

Frugoni, however, was taken into favor by the Spanish Bourbon who
succeeded, and after he had got himself unfrocked with infinite
difficulty (and only upon the intercession of divers princes and
prelates), he was as happy as any man of real talent could be who
devoted his gifts to the merest intellectual trifling. Not long before
his death he was addressed by one that wished to write his life.
He made answer that he had been a versifier and nothing more,
epigrammatically recounted the chief facts of his career, and ended by
saying, "of what I have written it is not worth while to speak"; and
posterity has upon the whole agreed with him, though, of course, no
edition of the Italian classics would be perfect without him. We know
this from the classics of our own tongue, which abound in marvels of
insipidity and emptiness.

But all this does not make him less interesting as a figure in that
amusing literarified society; and we may be glad to see him in Parma
with Signor Torelli's eyes, as he "issues smug, ornate, with his
well-fitting, polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking,
his whole immaculate person, and his demure visage, and, gently
sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes his way toward Casa Landi."

I do not know Casa Landi; I have never seen it; and yet I think I can
tell you of it: a gloomy-fronted pile of Romanesque architecture, the
lower story remarkable for its weather-stained, vermiculated stone,
and the ornamental iron gratings at the windows. The _porte-cochere_
stands wide open and shows the leaf and blossom of a lovely garden
inside, with a tinkling fountain in the midst. The marble nymphs and
naiads inhabiting the shrubbery and the water are already somewhat
time-worn, and have here and there a touch of envious mildew; but as
yet their noses are unbroken, and they have all the legs and arms
that the sculptor designed them with; and the fountain, which after
disasters must choke, plays prettily enough over their nude
loveliness; for it is now the first half of the eighteenth century,
and Casa Landi is the uninvaded sanctuary of Illustrissimi and
Illustrissime. The resplendent porter who admits our melodious Abbate
Carlo, and the gay lackey who runs before his smiling face to open
the door of the _sala_ where the company is assembled, may have had
nothing to speak of for breakfast, but they are full of zeal for the
grandeur they serve, and would not know what the rights of man were if
you told them. They, too, have their idleness and their intrigues and
their life of pleasure; but, poor souls! they fade pitiably in the
magnificence of that noble assembly in the sala. What coats of silk
and waistcoats of satin, what trig rapiers and flowing wigs and laces
and ruffles; and, ah me! what hoops and brocades, what paint and
patches! Behind the chair of every lady stands her cavaliere servente,
or bows before her with a cup of chocolate, or, sweet abasement!
stoops to adjust the foot-stool better to her satin shoe. There is a
buzz of satirical expectation, no doubt, till the abbate arrives,
"and then, after the first compliments and obeisances," says Signor
Torelli, "he throws his hat upon the great arm-chair, recounts
the chronicle of the gay world," and prepares for the special
entertainment of the occasion.

"'What is there new on Parnassus?' he is probably asked.

"'Nothing', he replies, 'save the bleating of a lambkin lost upon the
lonely heights of the sacred hill.'

"'I'll wager,' cries one of the ladies, 'that the shepherd who has
lost this lambkin is our Abbate Carlo!'

"'And what can escape the penetrating eye of Aglauro Cidonia?' retorts
Frugoni, softly, with a modest air.

"'Let us hear its bleating!' cries the lady of the house.

"'Let us hear it!' echo her husband and her cavaliere servente.

"'Let us hear it!' cry one, two, three, a half-dozen, visitors.

"Frugoni reads his new production; ten exclamations receive the first
strophe; the second awakens twenty _evvivas_; and when the reading
is ended the noise of the plaudits is so great that they cannot be
counted. His new production has cost Frugoni half an hour's work; it
is possibly the answer to some Mecaenas who has invited him to his
country-seat, or the funeral eulogy of some well-known cat. Is fame
bought at so cheap a rate? He is a fool who would buy it dearer;
and with this reasoning, which certainly is not without foundation,
Frugoni remained Frugoni when he might have been something very much
better.... If a bird sang, or a cat sneezed, or a dinner was given, or
the talk turned upon anything no matter how remote from poetry, it
was still for Frugoni an invitation to some impromptu effusion. If he
pricked his finger in mending a pen, he called from on high the god of
Lemnos and all the ironworkers of Olympus, not excepting Mars, whom it
was not reasonable to disturb for so little, and launched innumerable
reproaches at them, since without their invention of arms a penknife
would never have been made. If the heavens cleared up after a long
rain, all the signs of the zodiac were laid under contribution and
charged to give an account of their performance. If somebody died, he
instantly poured forth rivers of tears in company with the nymphs of
Eridanus and the Heliades; he upraided Phaethon, Themis, the Shades of
Erebus, and the Parcae.... The Amaryllises, the Dryads, the Fauns, the
woolly lambs, the shepherds, the groves, the demigods, the Castalian
Virgins, the loose-haired nymphs, the leafy boughs, the goat-footed
gods, the Graces, the pastoral pipes, and all the other sylvan rubbish
were the prime materials of every poetic composition."

III

Signor Torelli is less severe than Emiliani-Giudici upon the founders
of the Arcadia, and thinks they may have had intentions quite
different from the academical follies that resulted; while Leigh Hunt,
who has some account of the Arcadia in his charming essay on the
Sonnet, feels none of the national shame of the Italian critics, and
is able to write of it with perfect gayety. He finds a reason for its
amazing success in the childlike traits of Italian character; and,
reminding his readers that the Arcadia was established in 1690,
declares that what the Englishmen of William and Mary's reign would
have received with shouts of laughter, and the French under Louis XIV,
would have corrupted and made perilous to decency, "was so mixed up
with better things in these imaginative and, strange as it may seem,
most unaffected people, the Italians,--for such they are,--that, far
from disgusting a nation accustomed to romantic impulses and to the
singing of poetry in their streets and gondolas, their gravest and
most distinguished men and, in many instances, women, too, ran
childlike into the delusion. The best of their poets", the
sweet-tongued Filicaja among others, "accepted farms in Arcadia
forthwith; ... and so little transitory did the fashion turn out
to be, that not only was Crescimbeni its active officer for
eight-and-thirty years, but the society, to whatever state of
insignificance it may have been reduced, exists at the present
moment".

Leigh Hunt names among Englishmen who were made Shepherds of Arcadia,
Mathias, author of the "Pursuits of Literature", and Joseph Cowper,
"who wrote the Memoirs of Tassoni and an historical memoir of Italian
tragedy", Haly, and Mrs. Thrale, as well as those poor Delia Cruscans
whom bloody-minded Gifford champed between his tusked jaws in his
now forgotten satires. Pope Pius VII. gave the Arcadians a suite of
apartments in the Vatican; but I dare say the wicked tyranny now
existing at Rome has deprived the harmless swains of this shelter, if
indeed they had not been turned out before Victor Emmanuel came.

In the chapter on the Arcadia, with which Vernon Lee opens her
admirable Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, she tells us of
several visits which she recently paid to the Bosco Parrasio, long the
chief fold of the Academy. She found it with difficulty on the road to
the Villa Pamphili, in a neighborhood wholly ignorant of Arcadia and
of the relation of Bosco Parrasio to it. "The house, once the summer
resort of Arcadian sonneteers, was now abandoned to a family of
market-gardeners, who hung their hats and jackets on the marble heads
of improvvisatori and crowned poetesses, and threw their beans, maize,
and garden-tools into the corners of the desolate reception-rooms,
from whose mildewed walls looked down a host of celebrities--brocaded
doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals, simpering
drearily in their desolation," and "sad, haggard poetesses in
sea-green and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks and meager
arms, holding lyres; fat, ill-shaven priests in white bands and
mop-wigs; sonneteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-colored
stomachers and embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary poets, flaunting
in many-colored waistcoats and gorgeous shawls."

But whatever the material adversity of Arcadia, it still continues
to reward ascertained merit by grants of pasturage out of its ideal
domains. Indeed, it is but a few years since our own Longfellow, on a
visit to Rome, was waited upon by the secretary of the Arch-Flock,
and presented, after due ceremonies and the reading of a floral and
herbaceous sonnet, with a parchment bestowing upon him some very
magnificent possessions in that extraordinary dreamland. In telling me
of this he tried to recall his Arcadian name, but could only remember
that it was "Olympico something."

GIUSEPPE PARINI

I

In 1748 began for Italy a peace of nearly fifty years, when the Wars
of the Succession, with which the contesting strangers had ravaged
her soil, absolutely ceased. In Lombardy the Austrian rulers who had
succeeded the Spaniards did and suffered to be done many things for
the material improvement of a province which they were content to
hold, while leaving the administration mainly to the Lombards; the
Spanish Bourbon at Naples also did as little harm and as much good to
his realm as a Bourbon could; Pier Leopoldo of Tuscany, Don Filippo I.
of Parma, Francis III. of Modena, and the Popes Benedict XIV., Clement
XIV., and Pius VI. were all disposed to be paternally beneficent to
their peoples, who at least had repose under them, and in this period
gave such names to science as those of Galvani and Volta, to humanity
that of Beccaria, to letters those of Alfieri, Filicaja, Goldoni,
Parini, and many others.

But in spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period,
Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this
long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French
republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and
letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business
of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue
to the social history of the time; but the idea which remains in
the mind is one of a tranquillity in which every person of breeding
devoted himself to the cult of some muse or other, and established
himself as the conventional admirer of his neighbor's wife. The
great Academy of Arcadia, founded to restore good taste in poetry,
prescribed conditions by which everybody, of whatever age or sex,
could become a poetaster, and good society expected every gentleman
and lady to be in love. The Arcadia still exists, but that gallant
society hardly survived the eighteenth century. Perhaps the greatest
wonder about it is that it could have lasted so long as it did. Its
end was certainly not delayed for want of satirists who perceived its
folly and pursued it with scorn. But this again only brings one doubt,
often felt, whether satire ever accomplished anything beyond a lively
portraiture of conditions it proposed to reform.

It is the opinion of some Italian critics that Italian demoralization
began with the reaction against Luther, when the Jesuits rose to
supreme power in the Church and gathered the whole education of the
young into the hands of the priests. Cesare Cantu, whose book on
_Parini ed il suo Secolo_ may be read with pleasure and instruction by
such as like to know more fully the time of which I speak, was of this
mind; he became before his death a leader of the clerical party in
Italy, and may be supposed to be without unfriendly prejudice. He
alleges that the priestly education made the Italians _literati_
rather than citizens; Latinists, poets, instead of good magistrates,
workers, fathers of families; it cultivated the memory at the expense
of the judgment, the fancy at the cost of the reason, and made them
selfish, polished, false; it left a boy "apathetic, irresolute,
thoughtless, pusillanimous; he flattered his superiors and hated his
fellows, in each of whom he dreaded a spy." He knew the beautiful and
loved the grandiose; his pride of family and ancestry was inordinately
pampered. What other training he had was in the graces and
accomplishments; he was thoroughly instructed in so much of warlike
exercise as enabled him to handle a rapier perfectly and to conduct or
fight a duel with punctilio.

But he was no warrior; his career was peace. The old medieval Italians
who had combated like lions against the French and Germans and against
each other, when resting from the labors and the high conceptions
which have left us the chief sculptures and architecture of the
Peninsula, were dead; and their posterity had almost ceased to know
war. Italy had indeed still remained a battle-ground, but not for
Italian quarrels nor for Italian swords; the powers which, like
Venice, could afford to have quarrels of their own, mostly hired other
people to fight them out. All the independent states of the Peninsula
had armies, but armies that did nothing; in Lombardy, neither
Frenchman, Spaniard, nor Austrian had been able to recruit or draft
soldiers; the flight of young men from the conscription depopulated
the province, until at last Francis II. declared it exempt from
military service; Piedmont, the Macedon, the Boeotia of that Greece,
alone remained warlike, and Piedmont was alone able, when the hour
came, to show Italy how to do for herself.

Yet, except in the maritime republics, the army, idle and unwarlike as
it was in most cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to
the younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were
the other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal
honor and profit; nearly every argosy that sailed to or from the port
of Venice belonged to some lordly speculator; but in Milan a noble who
descended to trade lost his nobility, by a law not abrogated till the
time of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could
not go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight;
the civil service was of course actually performed by subordinates;
there were not cures for half the priests, and there grew up that odd,
polite rabble of _abbati_, like our good Frugoni, priests without
cures, sometimes attached to noble families as chaplains, sometimes
devoting themselves to literature or science, sometimes leading lives
of mere leisure and fashion; they were mostly of plebeian origin when
they did anything at all besides pay court to the ladies.

In Milan the nobles were exempt from many taxes paid by the plebeians;
they had separate courts of law, with judges of their own order,
before whom a plebeian plaintiff appeared with what hope of justice
can be imagined. Yet they were not oppressive; they were at worst only
insolent to their inferiors, and they commonly used them with the
gentleness which an Italian can hardly fail in. There were many ties
of kindness between the classes, the memory of favors and services
between master and servant, landlord and tenant, in relations which
then lasted a life-time, and even for generations. In Venice, where it
was one of the high privileges of the patrician to spit from his box
at the theater upon the heads of the people in the pit, the familiar
bond of patron and client so endeared the old republican nobles to the
populace that the Venetian poor of this day, who know them only by
tradition, still lament them. But, on the whole, men have found it
at Venice, as elsewhere, better not to be spit upon, even by an
affectionate nobility.

The patricians were luxurious everywhere. In Rome they built splendid
palaces, in Milan they gave gorgeous dinners. Goldoni, in his charming
memoirs, tells us that the Milanese of his time never met anywhere
without talking of eating, and they did eat upon all possible
occasions, public, domestic, and religious; throughout Italy they have
yet the nickname of _lupi lombardi_ (Lombard wolves) which their
good appetites won them. The nobles of that gay old Milan were very
hospitable, easy of access to persons of the proper number of
descents, and full of invitations for the stranger. A French writer
found their cooking delicate and estimable as that of his own nation;
but he adds that many of these friendly, well-dining aristocrats had
not good _ton_. One can think of them at our distance of time and
place with a kindness which Italian critics, especially those of the
bitter period of struggle about the middle of this century, do not
affect. Emiliani-Giudici, for example, does not, when he calls them
and their order throughout Italy an aristocratic leprosy. He assures
us that at the time of that long peace "the moral degradation of what
the French call the great world was the inveterate habit of centuries;
the nobles wallowed in their filth untouched by remorse"; and he
speaks of them as "gilded swine, vain of the glories of their blazons,
which they dragged through the mire of their vices."

II

This is when he is about to consider a poem in which the Lombard
nobility are satirized--if it was satire to paint them to the life. He
says that he would be at a loss what passages to quote from it, but
fortunately "an unanimous posterity has done Parini due honor"; and he
supposes "now there is no man, of whatever sect or opinion, but has
read his immortal poem, and has its finest scenes by heart." It is
this fact which embarrasses me, however, for how am I to rehabilitate
a certain obsolete characteristic figure without quoting from Parini,
and constantly wearying people with what they know already so well?
The gentle reader, familiar with Parini's immortal poem----

_The Gentle Reader._--His immortal poem? What _is_ his immortal poem?
I never heard even the name of it!

Is it possible? But you, fair reader, who have its finest scenes by
heart----

_The Fair Reader._--Yes, certainly; of course. But one reads so many
things. I don't believe I half remember those striking passages
of----what is the poem? And who did you say the author was?

Oh, madam! And is this undying fame? Is this the immortality for which
we waste our time? Is this the remembrance for which the essayist
sicklies his visage over with the pale cast of thought? Why, at this
rate, even those whose books are favorably noticed by the newspapers
will be forgotten in a thousand years. But it is at least consoling
to know that you have merely forgotten Parini's poems, the subject of
which you will at once recollect when I remind you that it is called
The Day, and celebrates The Morning, The Noon, The Evening, and The
Night of a gentleman of fashion as Milan knew him for fifty years in
the last century.

This gentleman, whatever his nominal business in the world might
be, was first and above all a cavaliere servente, and the cavaliere
servente was the invention, it is said, of Genoese husbands who had
not the leisure to attend their wives to the theater, the promenade,
the card-table, the _conversazione_, and so installed their nearest
idle friends permanently in the office. The arrangement was found so
convenient that the cavaliere servente presently spread throughout
Italy; no lady of fashion was thought properly appointed without one;
and the office was now no longer reserved to bachelors; it was not at
all good form for husband and wife to love each other, and the husband
became the cavalier of some other lady, and the whole fine world was
thus united, by a usage of which it is very hard to know just how far
it was wicked and how far it was only foolish; perhaps it is safest to
say that at the best it was apt to be somewhat of the one and always
a great deal of the other. In the good society of that day, marriage
meant a settlement in life for the girl who had escaped her sister's
fate of a sometimes forced religious vocation. But it did not matter
so much about the husband if the marriage contract stipulated that
she should have her cavaliere servente, and, as sometimes happened,
specified him by name. With her husband there was a union of fortunes,
with the expectation of heirs; the companionship, the confidence, the
faith, was with the cavalier; there could be no domesticity, no family
life with either. The cavaliere servente went with his lady to church,
where he dipped his finger in the holy-water and offered it her to
moisten her own finger at; and he held her prayer-book for her when
she rose from her knees and bowed to the high altar. In fact, his
place seems to have been as fully acknowledged and honored, if not by
the Church, then by all the other competent authorities, as that of
the husband. Like other things, his relation to his lady was subject
to complication and abuse; no doubt, ladies of fickle minds changed
their cavaliers rather often; and in those days following the
disorder of the French invasions, the relation suffered deplorable
exaggerations and perversions. But when Giuseppe Parini so minutely
and graphically depicted the day of a noble Lombard youth, the
cavaliere servente was in his most prosperous and illustrious state;
and some who have studied Italian social conditions in the past bid
us not too virtuously condemn him, since, preposterous as he was, his
existence was an amelioration of disorders at which we shall find it
better not even to look askance.

Parini's poem is written in the form of instructions to the hero for
the politest disposal of his time; and in a strain of polished irony
allots the follies of his day to their proper hours. The poet's
apparent seriousness never fails him, but he does not suffer his
irony to become a burden to the reader, relieving it constantly with
pictures, episodes, and excursions, and now and then breaking into a
strain of solemn poetry which is fine enough. The work will suggest to
the English reader the light mockery of "The Rape of the Lock", and in
less degree some qualities of Gray's "Trivia"; but in form and manner
it is more like Phillips's "Splendid Shilling" than either of these;
and yet it is not at all like the last in being a mere burlesque of
the epic style. These resemblances have been noted by Italian critics,
who find them as unsatisfactory as myself; but they will serve to make
the extracts I am to give a little more intelligible to the reader
who does not recur to the whole poem. Parini was not one to break a
butterfly upon a wheel; he felt the fatuity of heavily moralizing upon
his material; the only way was to treat it with affected gravity, and
to use his hero with the respect which best mocks absurdity. One
of his arts is to contrast the deeds of his hero with those of his
forefathers, of which he is so proud,--of course the contrast is to
the disadvantage of the forefathers,--and in these allusions to the
past glories of Italy it seems to me that the modern patriotic poetry
which has done so much to make Italy begins for the first time to feel
its wings.

Parini was in all things a very stanch, brave, and original spirit,
and if he was of any school, it was that of the Venetian, Gasparo
Gozzi, who wrote pungent and amusing social satires in blank verse,
and published at Venice an essay-paper, like the "Spectator", the
name of which he turned into _l'Osservatore_. It dealt, like the
"Spectator" and all that race of journals, with questions of letters
and manners, and was long honored, like the "Spectator", as a model of
prose. With an apparent prevalence of French taste, there was in fact
much study by Italian authors of English literature at this time,
which was encouraged by Dr. Johnson's friend, Baretti, the author of
the famous _Frusta Letteraria_ (Literary Scourge), which drew blood
from so many authorlings, now bloodless; it was wielded with more
severity than wisdom, and fell pretty indiscriminately upon the bad
and the good. It scourged among others Goldoni, the greatest master of
the comic art then living, but it spared our Parini, the first part of
whose poem Baretti salutes with many kindly phrases, though he cannot
help advising him to turn the poem into rhyme. But when did a critic
ever know less than a poet about a poet's business?

III

The first part of Parini's Day is Morning, that mature hour at which
the hero awakes from the glories and fatigues of the past night. His
valet appears, and throwing open the shutters asks whether he will
have coffee or chocolate in bed, and when he has broken his fast and
risen, the business of the day begins. The earliest comer is perhaps
the dancing-master, whose elegant presence we must not deny ourselves:

He, entering, stops
Erect upon the threshold, elevating
Both shoulders; then contracting like a tortoise
His neck a little, at the same time drops
Slightly his chin, and, with the extremest tip
Of his plumed hat, lightly touches his lips.

In their order come the singing-master and the master of the violin,
and, with more impressiveness than the rest, the teacher of French,
whose advent hushes all Italian sounds, and who is to instruct the
hero to forget his plebeian native tongue. He is to send meanwhile to
ask how the lady he serves has passed the night, and attending her
response he may read Voltaire in a sumptuous Dutch or French binding,
or he may amuse himself with a French romance; or it may happen that
the artist whom he has engaged to paint the miniature of his lady (to
be placed in the same jeweled case with his own) shall bring his work
at this hour for criticism. Then the valets robe him from head to
foot in readiness for the hair-dresser and the barber, whose work is
completed with the powdering of his hair.

At last the labor of the learned comb
Is finished, and the elegant artist strews
With lightly shaken hand a powdery mist
To whiten ere their time thy youthful locks.

* * * * *

Now take heart,
And in the bosom of that whirling cloud
Plunge fearlessly. O brave! O mighty! Thus
Appeared thine ancestor through smoke and fire
Of battle, when his country's trembling gods
His sword avenged, and shattered the fierce foe
And put to flight. But he, his visage stained,
With dust and smoke, and smirched with gore and sweat,
His hair torn and tossed wild, came from the strife
A terrible vision, even to compatriots
His hand had rescued; milder thou by far,
And fairer to behold, in white array
Shalt issue presently to bless the eyes
Of thy fond country, which the mighty arm
Of thy forefather and thy heavenly smile
Equally keep content and prosperous.

When the hero is finally dressed for the visit to his lady, it is in
this splendid figure:

Let purple gaiters, clasp thine ankles fine
In noble leather, that no dust or mire
Blemish thy foot; down from thy shoulders flow
Loosely a tunic fair, thy shapely arms
Cased in its closely-fitting sleeves, whose borders
Of crimson or of azure velvet let
The heliotrope's color tinge. Thy slender throat,
Encircle with a soft and gauzy band.
Thy watch already
Bids thee make haste to go. O me, how fair
The Arsenal of tiny charms that hang
With a harmonious tinkling from its chain!
What hangs not there of fairy carriages
And fairy steeds so marvelously feigned
In gold that every charger seems alive?

This magnificent swell, of the times when swells had the world quite
their own way, finds his lady already surrounded with visitors when he
calls to revere her, as he would have said, and he can therefore make
the more effective arrival. Entering her presence he puts on his very
finest manner, which I am sure we might all study to our advantage.

Let thy right hand be pressed against thy side
Beneath thy waistcoat, and the other hand
Upon thy snowy linen rest, and hide
Next to thy heart; let the breast rise sublime,
The shoulders broaden both, and bend toward her
Thy pliant neck; then at the corners close
Thy lips a little, pointed in the middle
Somewhat; and from thy month thus set exhale
A murmur inaudible. Meanwhile her right
Let her have given, and now softly drop
On the warm ivory a double kiss.
Seat thyself then, and with one hand draw closer
Thy chair to hers, while every tongue is stilled.
Thou only, bending slightly over, with her
Exchange in whisper secret nothings, which
Ye both accompany with mutual smiles
And covert glances that betray, or seem
At least, your tender passion to betray.

It must have been mighty pretty, as Master Pepys says, to look at the
life from which this scene was painted, for many a dandy of either
sex doubtless sat for it. The scene was sometimes heightened by the
different humor in which the lady and the cavalier received each
other, as for instance when they met with reproaches and offered the
spectacle of a lover's quarrel to the company. In either case, it is
for the hero to lead the lady out to dinner.

With a bound
Rise to thy feet, signor, and give thy hand
Unto thy lady, whom, tenderly drooping,
Support thou with thy strength, and to the table
Accompany, while the guests come after you.
And last of all the husband follows....

Or rather--

If to the husband still
The vestige of a generous soul remain,
Let him frequent another board; beside
Another lady sit, whose husband dines
Yet somewhere else beside another lady,
Whose spouse is likewise absent; and so add
New links unto the chain immense, wherewith
Love, alternating, binds the whole wide world.

Behold thy lady seated at the board:
Relinquish now her hand, and while the servant
Places the chair that not too far she sit,
And not so near that her soft bosom press
Too close against the table, with a spring
Stoop thou and gather round thy lady's feet
The wandering volume of her robe. Beside her
Then sit thee down; for the true cavalier
Is not permitted to forsake the side
Of her he serves, except there should arise
Some strange occasion warranting the use
Of so great freedom.

When one reads of these springs and little hops, which were once so
elegant, it is almost with a sigh for a world which no longer springs
or hops in the service of beauty, or even dreams of doing it. But a
passage which will touch the sympathetic with a still keener sense of
loss is one which hints how lovely a lady looked when carving, as she
then sometimes did:

Swiftly now the blade,
That sharp and polished at thy right hand lies,
Draw naked forth, and like the blade of Mars
Flash it upon the eyes of all. The point
Press 'twixt thy finger-tips, and bowing low
Offer the handle to her. Now is seen
The soft and delicate playing of the muscles
In the white hand upon its work intent.
The graces that around the lady stoop
Clothe themselves in new forms, and from her fingers
Sportively flying, flutter to the tips
Of her unconscious rosy knuckles, thence
To dip into the hollows of the dimples
That Love beside her knuckles has impressed.

Throughout the dinner it is the part of the well-bred husband--if so
ill-bred as to remain at all to sit impassive and quiescent while the
cavalier watches over the wife with tender care, prepares her food,
offers what agrees with her, and forbids what harms. He is virtually
master of the house; he can order the servants about; if the dinner is
not to his mind, it is even his high prerogative to scold the cook.

The poet reports something of the talk at table; and here occurs one
of the most admired passages of the poem, the light irony of which it
is hard to reproduce in a version. One of the guests, in a strain of
affected sensibility, has been denouncing man's cruelty to animals:

Thus he discourses; and a gentle tear
Springs, while he speaks, into thy lady's eyes.
She recalls the day--
Alas, the cruel day!--what time her lap-dog,
Her beauteous lap-dog, darling of the Graces,
Sporting in youthful gayety, impressed
The light mark of her ivory tooth upon
The rude foot of a menial; he, with bold
And sacrilegious toe, flung her away.
Over and over thrice she rolled, and thrice
Rumpled her silken coat, and thrice inhaled
With tender nostril the thick, choking dust,
Then raised imploring cries, and "Help, help, help!"
She seemed to call, while from the gilded vaults
Compassionate Echo answered her again,
And from their cloistral basements in dismay
The servants rushed, and from the upper rooms
The pallid maidens trembling flew; all came.
Thy lady's face was with reviving essence
Sprinkled, and she awakened from her swoon.
Anger and grief convulsed her still; she cast
A lightning glance upon the guilty menial,
And thrice with languid voice she called her pet,
Who rushed to her embrace and seemed to invoke
Vengeance with her shrill tenor. And revenge
Thou hadst, fair poodle, darling of the Graces.
The guilty menial trembled, and with eyes
Downcast received his doom. Naught him availed
His twenty years' desert; naught him availed
His zeal in secret services; for him
In vain were prayer and promise; forth he went,
Spoiled of the livery that till now had made him
Enviable with the vulgar. And in vain
He hoped another lord; the tender dames
Were horror-struck at his atrocious crime,
And loathed the author. The false wretch succumbed
With all his squalid brood, and in the streets
With his lean wife in tatters at his side
Vainly lamented to the passer-by.

It would be quite out of taste for the lover to sit as apathetic as
the husband in the presence of his lady's guests, and he is to mingle
gracefully in the talk from time to time, turning it to such topics
as may best serve to exploit his own accomplishments. As a man of the
first fashion, he must be in the habit of seeming to have read Horace
a little, and it will be a pretty effect to quote him now; one may
also show one's acquaintance with the new French philosophy, and
approve its skepticism, while keeping clear of its pernicious
doctrines, which insidiously teach--

That every mortal is his fellow's peer;
That not less dear to Nature and to God
Is he who drives thy carriage, or who guides
The plow across thy field, than thine own self.

But at last the lady makes a signal to the cavalier that it is time to
rise from the table:

Spring to thy feet
The first of all, and drawing near thy lady
Remove her chair and offer her thy hand,
And lead her to the other rooms, nor suffer longer
That the stale reek of viands shall offend
Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites
The grateful odor of the coffee, where
It smokes upon a smaller table hid
And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums
That meanwhile burn sweeten and purify
The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence
All lingering traces of the feast.--Ye sick
And poor, whom misery or whom hope perchance
Has guided in the noonday to these doors,
Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng,
With mutilated limbs and squalid faces,
In litters and on crutches, from afar
Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils
Drink in the nectar of the feast divine
That favorable zephyrs waft to you;
But do not dare besiege these noble precincts,
Importunately offering her that reigns
Within your loathsome spectacle of woe!
--And now, sir, 'tis your office to prepare
The tiny cup that then shall minister,
Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady's lips;
And now bethink thee whether she prefer
The boiling beverage much or little tempered
With sweet; or if perchance she like it best
As doth the barbarous spouse, then, when she sits
Upon brocades of Persia, with light fingers
The bearded visage of her lord caressing.

With the dinner the second part of the poem, entitled The Noon,
concludes, and The Afternoon begins with the visit which the hero and
his lady pay to one of her friends. He has already thought with which
of the husband's horses they shall drive out; he has suggested which
dress his lady shall wear and which fan she shall carry; he has
witnessed the agonizing scene of her parting with her lap-dog,--her
children are at nurse and never intrude,--and they have arrived in
the palace of the lady on whom they are to call:

And now the ardent friends to greet each other
Impatient fly, and pressing breast to breast
They tenderly embrace, and with alternate kisses
Their cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they drop
Plummet-like down upon the sofa, both
Together. Seated thus, one flings a phrase,
Subtle and pointed, at the other's heart,
Hinting of certain things that rumor tells,
And in her turn the other with a sting
Assails. The lovely face of one is flushed
With beauteous anger, and the other bites
Her pretty lips a little; evermore
At every instant waxes violent
The anxious agitation of the fans.
So, in the age of Turpin, if two knights
Illustrious and well cased in mail encountered
Upon the way, each cavalier aspired
To prove the valor of the other in arms,
And, after greetings courteous and fair,
They lowered their lances and their chargers dashed
Ferociously together; then they flung
The splintered fragments of their spears aside,
And, fired with generous fury, drew their huge,
Two-handed swords and rushed upon each other!
But in the distance through a savage wood
The clamor of a messenger is heard,
Who comes full gallop to recall the one
Unto King Charles, and th' other to the camp
Of the young Agramante. Dare thou, too,
Dare thou, invincible youth, to expose the curls
And the toupet, so exquisitely dressed
This very morning, to the deadly shock
Of the infuriate fans; to new emprises
Thy fair invite, and thus the extreme effects
Of their periculous enmity suspend.

Is not this most charmingly done? It seems to me that the warlike
interpretation of the scene is delightful; and those embattled
fans--their perfumed breath comes down a hundred years in the verse!

The cavalier and his lady now betake them to the promenade, where
all the fair world of Milan is walking or driving, with a punctual
regularity which still distinguishes Italians in their walks and
drives. The place is full of their common acquaintance, and the
carriages are at rest for the exchange of greetings and gossip, in
which the hero must take his part. All this is described in the
same note of ironical seriousness as the rest of the poem, and The
Afternoon closes with a strain of stately and grave poetry which
admirably heightens the desired effect:

Behold the servants
Ready for thy descent; and now skip down
And smooth the creases from thy coat, and order
The laces on thy breast; a little stoop,
And on thy snowy stockings bend a glance,
And then erect thyself and strut away
Either to pace the promenade alone,--
'T is thine, if 't please thee walk; or else to draw
Anigh the carriages of other dames.
Thou clamberest up, and thrustest in thy head
And arms and shoulders, half thyself within
The carriage door. There let thy laughter rise
So loud that from afar thy lady hear,
And rage to hear, and interrupt the wit
Of other heroes who had swiftly run
Amid the dusk to keep her company
While thou wast absent. O ye powers supreme,
Suspend the night, and let the noble deeds
Of my young hero shine upon the world
In the clear day! Nay, night must follow still
Her own inviolable laws, and droop
With silent shades over one half the globe;
And slowly moving on her dewy feet,
She blends the varied colors infinite,
And with the border of her mighty garments
Blots everything; the sister she of Death
Leaves but one aspect indistinct, one guise
To fields and trees, to flowers, to birds and beasts,
And to the great and to the lowly born,
Confounding with the painted cheek of beauty
The haggard face of want, and gold with tatters.
Nor me will the blind air permit to see
Which carriages depart, and which remain,
Secret amidst the shades; but from my hand
The pencil caught, my hero is involved
Within the tenebrous and humid veil.

The concluding section of the poem, by chance or by wise design of
the author, remains a fragment. In this he follows his hero from the
promenade to the evening party, with an account of which The Night is
mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in
it, with light sketches of expression and attitude; but on the whole
it has not so many distinctly quotable passages as the other parts
of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady
continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them
alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the
hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting
down at those games of chance with which every fashionable house was
provided and at which the lady loses or doubles her pin-money. In
Milan long trains were then the mode, and any woman might wear them,
but only patricians were allowed to have them carried by servants;
the rich plebeian must drag her costly skirts in the dust; and the
nobility of our hero's lady is honored by the flunkeys who lift her
train as she enters the house. The hostess, seated on a sofa, receives
her guests with a few murmured greetings, and then abandons herself to
the arduous task of arranging the various partners at cards. When the
cavalier serves his lady at supper, he takes his handkerchief from his
pocket and spreads it on her lap; such usages and the differences of
costume distinguished an evening party at Milan then from the like joy
in our time and country.

IV

The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was
not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at
Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds
that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His
father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school
in Milan, where his scholarship was not equal to his early literary
promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with
people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the
Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure,
and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in
noble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others),
in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life
he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already
supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also,
at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and
had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one's
copyright was good for nothing across the border--scarcely a fair
stone's-throw away--of one's own little duchy or province, and the
printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it
is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which,
later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in
London, where he had seen the prosperity of "the trade of an author"
in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed
with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country.
So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a _maestro in
casa_. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their
company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes
that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows
in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused
sense of the artist as with the moralist's indignation; some of his
contemporaries accused him of a snobbish fondness for the great, but
certainly he did not flatter them, and in one passage of his poem he
is at the pains to remind his noble acquaintance that not the smallest
drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins.
His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor
of the government newspaper,--the only newspaper in Milan,--and yet
easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine
Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time
to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French
Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor.
The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty
it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one
to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of
liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a
mob was severely handled by the military, and for "insulting" a tree
of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of
the municipal government, which, apparently popular, could really do
nothing but register the decrees of the military commandant. He proved
so little useful in this government that he was expelled from it, and,
giving his salary to his native parish, he fell into something like
his old poverty. He who had laughed to scorn the insolence and
folly of the nobles could not enjoy the insolence and folly of the
plebeians, and he was unhappy in that wild ferment of ideas, hopes,
principles, sentiments, which Milan became in the time of the
Cisalpine Republic. He led a retired life, and at last, in 1799,
having risen one day to studies which he had never remitted, he died
suddenly in his arm-chair.

Many stories are told of his sayings and doings in those troubled days
when he tried to serve the public. At the theater once some one cried
out, "Long live the republic, death to the aristocrats!" "No,"
shouted Parini, who abhorred the abominable bloodthirstiness of the
liberators, "long live the republic, death to nobody!" They were
going to take away a crucifix from a room where he appeared on public
business. "Very well," he observed; "where Citizen Christ cannot stay,
I have nothing to do," and went out. "Equality doesn't consist in
dragging me down to your level," he said to one who had impudently
given him the _thou_, "but in raising you to mine, if possible. You
will always be a pitiful creature, even though you call yourself
Citizen; and though you call me Citizen, you can't help my being the
Abbate Parini." To another, who reproached him for kindness to an
Austrian prisoner, he answered, "I would do as much for a Turk, a
Jew, an Arab; I would do it even for you if you were in need." In his
closing years many sought him for literary counsel; those for whom
there was hope he encouraged; those for whom there was none, he made
it a matter of conscience not to praise. A poor fellow came to repeat
him two sonnets, in order to be advised which to print; Parini heard
the first, and, without waiting further, besought him "Print the
other!"

VITTORIO ALFIERI

Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would
undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and
who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct
dramatic power, not surpassed if equaled since, is scarcely more than
a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti,
a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater
regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he
belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe.
"What a singular country is ours!" said the Chevalier Nigra, one
of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the
delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the
second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. "In Paris they
admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen
are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for
me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;" and if this was true
in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what
society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.

I

It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri
should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of
Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he
spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever
he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the
humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of
French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he
does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like
could be true of the education of a gentleman as a gentleman got it
from the Italian priests of the last century. "We translated," he
says, "the 'Lives of Cornelius Nepos'; but none of us, perhaps not
even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated,
nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under
what governments, nor what any government was." He learned Latin
enough to turn Virgil's "Georgics" into his sort of Italian; but when
he read Ariosto by stealth, he atoned for his transgression by failing
to understand him. Yet Alfieri tells us that he was one of the first
scholars of that admirable academy, and he really had some impulses
even then toward literature; for he liked reading Goldoni and
Metastasio, though he had never heard of the name of Tasso. This was
whilst he was still in the primary classes, under strict priestly
control; when he passed to a more advanced grade and found himself
free to do what he liked in the manner that pleased him best, in
common with the young Russians, Germans, and Englishmen then enjoying
the advantages of the Academy of Turin, he says that being grounded in
no study, directed by no one, and not understanding any language well,
he did not know what study to take up, or how to study. "The reading
of many French romances," he goes on, "the constant association with
foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear
it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan
which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of
burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of
it," he says, "the French entered into my empty brain"; but he is
careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he
afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, very
bitterly.

It was before this, a little, that Alfieri contrived his first sonnet,
which, when he read it to the uncle with whom he lived, made that old
soldier laugh unmercifully, so that until his twenty-fifth year the
poet made no further attempts in verse. When he left school he spent
three years in travel, after the fashion of those grand-touring days
when you had to be a gentleman of birth and fortune in order to
travel, and when you journeyed by your own conveyance from capital to
capital, with letters to your sovereign's ambassadors everywhere, and
spent your money handsomely upon the dissipations of the countries
through which you passed. Alfieri is constantly at the trouble to have
us know that he was a very morose and ill-conditioned young animal,
and the figure he makes as a traveler is no more amiable than
edifying. He had a ruling passion for horses, and then several smaller
passions quite as wasteful and idle. He was driven from place to place
by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city,
in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough
in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise
of his future literary greatness. At the Ambrosian Library in Milan
they showed him a manuscript of Petrarch's, which, "like a true
barbarian," as he says, he flung aside, declaring that he knew nothing
about it, having a rancor against this Petrarch, whom he had once
tried to read and had understood as little as Ariosto. At Rome the
Sardinian minister innocently affronted him by repeating some verses
of Marcellus, which the sulky young noble could not comprehend. In
Ferrara he did not remember that it was the city of that divine
Ariosto whose poem was the first that came into his hands, and
which he had now read in part with infinite pleasure. "But my poor
intellect," he says, "was then sleeping a most sordid sleep, and every
day, as far as regards letters, rusted more and more. It is true,
however, that with respect to knowledge of the world and of men I
constantly learned not a little, without taking note of it, so many
and diverse were the phases of life and manners that I daily beheld."
At Florence he visited the galleries and churches with much disgust
and no feeling, for the beautiful, especially in painting, his
eyes being very dull to color. "If I liked anything better, it was
sculpture a little, and architecture yet a little more"; and it is
interesting to note how all his tragedies reflect these preferences,
in their lack of color and in their sculpturesque sharpness of
outline.

From Italy he passed as restlessly into France, yet with something
of a more definite intention, for he meant to frequent the French
theater. He had seen a company of French players at Turin, and had
acquainted himself with the most famous French tragedies and comedies,
but with no thought of writing tragedies of his own. He felt no
creative impulse, and he liked the comedies best, though, as he says,
he was by nature more inclined to tears than to laughter. But he does
not seem to have enjoyed the theater much in Paris, a city for which
he conceived at once the greatest dislike, he says, "on account of the
squalor and barbarity of the buildings, the absurd and pitiful pomp
of the few houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and
gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of
that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that
all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably
misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest of women."

He had at this time already conceived that hatred of kings which
breathes, or, I may better say, bellows, from his tragedies; and he
was enraged even beyond his habitual fury by his reception at court,
where it was etiquette for Louis XV. to stare at him from head to foot
and give no sign of having received any impression whatever.

In Holland he fell in love, for the first time, and as was requisite
in the polite society of that day, the object of his passion was
another man's wife. In England he fell in love the second time, and as
fashionably as before. The intrigue lasted for months; in the end it
came to a duel with the lady's husband and a great scandal in the
newspapers; but in spite of these displeasures, Alfieri liked
everything in England. "The streets, the taverns, the horses, the
women, the universal prosperity, the life and activity of that island,
the cleanliness and convenience of the houses, though extremely
little,"--as they still strike every one coming from Italy,--these and
other charms of "that fortunate and free country" made an impression
upon him that never was effaced. He did not at that time, he says,
"study profoundly the constitution, mother of so much prosperity," but
he "knew enough to observe and value its sublime effects."

Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin
reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose
delighted and whose verse wearied him. "But the book of books for me,"
he says, "and the one which that winter caused me to pass hours of
bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and
some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and
others, I read and read again, with such a transport of cries, tears,
and fury, that if any one had heard me in the next room he would
surely have thought me mad. In meditating certain grand traits of
these supreme men, I often leaped to my feet, agitated and out of my
senses, and tears of grief and rage escaped me to think that I was
born in Piedmont, and in a time, and under a government, where no high
thing could be done or said; and it was almost useless to think or
feel it."

[Illustration: Vittorio Alfieri.]

These characters had a life-long fascination for Alfieri, and his
admiration of such types deeply influenced his tragedies. So great was
his scorn of kings at the time he writes of, that he despised even
those who liked them, and poor little Metastasio, who lived by the
bounty of Maria Theresa, fell under Alfieri's bitterest contempt when
in Vienna he saw his brother-poet before the empress in the imperial
gardens at Schonbrunn, "performing the customary genuflexions with a
servilely contented and adulatory face." This loathing of royalty was
naturally intensified beyond utterance in Prussia. "On entering the
states of Frederick, I felt redoubled and triplicated my hate for that
infamous military trade, most infamous and sole base of arbitrary
power." He told his minister that he would be presented only in civil
dress, because there were uniforms enough at that court, and he
declares that on beholding Frederick he felt "no emotion of wonder, or
of respect, but rather of indignation and rage.... The king addressed
me the three or four customary words; I fixed my eyes respectfully
upon his, and inwardly blessed Heaven that I had not been born
his slave; and I issued from that universal Prussian barracks ...
abhorring it as it deserved."

In Paris Alfieri bought the principal Italian authors, which he
afterwards carried everywhere with him on his travels; but he says
that he made very little use of them, having neither the will nor the
power to apply his mind to anything. In fact, he knew very little
Italian, most of the authors in his collection were strange to him,
and at the age of twenty-two he had read nothing whatever of Dante,
Petrarch, Tasso, Boccaccio, or Machiavelli.

He made a journey into Spain, among other countries, where he admired
the Andalusian horses, and bored himself as usual with what interests
educated people; and he signalized his stay at Madrid by a murderous
outburst of one of the worst tempers in the world. One night his
servant Elia, in dressing his hair, had the misfortune to twitch one
of his locks in such a way as to give him a slight pain; on which
Alfieri leaped to his feet, seized a heavy candlestick, and without
a word struck the valet such a blow upon his temple that the blood
gushed out over his face, and over the person of a young Spanish
gentleman who had been supping with Alfieri. Elia sprang upon his
master, who drew his sword, but the Spaniard after great ado quieted
them both; "and so ended this horrible encounter," says Alfieri, "for
which I remained deeply afflicted and ashamed. I told Elia that he
would have done well to kill me; and he was the man to have done it,
being a palm taller than myself, who am very tall, and of a strength
and courage not inferior to his height. Two hours later, his wound
being dressed and everything put in order, I went to bed, leaving the
door from my room into Elia's open as usual, without listening to the
Spaniard, who warned me not thus to invite a provoked and outraged man
to vengeance: I called to Elia, who had already gone to bed, that
he could, if he liked and thought proper, kill me that night, for I
deserved it. But he was no less heroic than I, and would take no other
revenge than to keep two handkerchiefs, which had been drenched in his
blood, and which from time to time he showed me in the course of many
years. This reciprocal mixture of fierceness and generosity on both
our parts will not be easily understood by those who have had no
experience of the customs and of the temper of us Piedmontese;" though
here, perhaps, Alfieri does his country too much honor in making his
ferocity a national trait. For the rest, he says, he never struck a
servant except as he would have done an equal--not with a cane, but
with his fist, or a chair, or anything else that came to hand; and he
seems to have thought this a democratic if not an amiable habit. When
at last he went back to Turin, he fell once more into his old life of
mere vacancy, varied before long by a most unworthy amour, of which he
tells us that he finally cured himself by causing his servant to tie
him in his chair, and so keep him a prisoner in his own house. A
violent distemper followed this treatment, which the light-moraled
gossip of the town said Alfieri had invented exclusively for his own
use; many days he lay in bed tormented by this anguish; but when he
rose he was no longer a slave to his passion. Shortly after, he wrote
a tragedy, or a tragic dialogue rather, in Italian blank verse, called
Cleopatra, which was played in a Turinese theater with a success of
which he tells us he was at once and always ashamed.

Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his
qualifications for tragical authorship being "a resolute spirit, very
obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every
kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its
furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against
all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of
various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ...
an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an
unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of
writing and managing my own language." With this stock in trade, he
set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first
in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful
study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian
was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr.
Macpherson, and Cesarotti's translation of him came into Alfieri's
hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with
a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for
the verse of dialogue.

He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had
nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the classics, which he
read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the
help of a teacher. But he believed that his originality as a tragic
author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more
tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already
given up Shakespeare. "The more that author accorded with my humor
(though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was
resolved to abstain," he tells us.

This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to
accustom himself "to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not
otherwise evermore." Here he versified his first two tragedies, and
sketched others; and here, he says, "I deluged my brain with the
verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Tasso, and of Ariosto, convinced that
the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and
words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified
with my own ideas and emotions."

He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the
business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had
been making love. He abandoned everything else for it--country, home,
money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany,
and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without
which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese noble of that day could not
reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his
sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his
former income. The king of Piedmont was very well, as kings went in
that day; and he did nothing to hinder the poet's expatriation. The
long period of study and production which followed Alfieri spent
chiefly at Florence, but partly also at Rome and Naples. During this
time he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that
relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century,
with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The
countess's husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of
the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil
destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were
difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not
perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, and which required an especial
grace on the part of the Pope. But this the Pope refused ever to
bestow, even after being much prayed; and when her husband was dead,
she and Alfieri were privately married, or were not married; the fact
is still in dispute. Their house became a center of fashionable and
intellectual society in Florence, and to be received in it was the
best that could happen to any one. The relation seems to have been a
sufficiently happy one; neither was painfully scrupulous in observing
its ties, and after Alfieri's death the countess gave to the painter
Fabre "a heart which," says Massimo d'Azeglio in his Memoirs,
"according to the usage of the time, and especially of high society,
felt the invincible necessity of keeping itself in continual
exercise." A cynical little story of Alfieri reading one of his
tragedies in company, while Fabre stood behind him making eyes at the
countess, and from time to time kissing her ring on his finger, was
told to D'Azeglio by an aunt of his who witnessed the scene.

In 1787 the poet went to France to oversee the printing of a complete
edition of his works, and five years later he found himself in Paris
when the Revolution was at its height. The countess was with him, and,
after great trouble, he got passports for both, and hurried to the
city barrier. The National Guards stationed there would have let them
pass, but a party of drunken patriots coming up had their worst fears
aroused by the sight of two carriages with sober and decent people in
them, and heavily laden with baggage. While they parleyed whether they
had better stone the equipages, or set fire to them, Alfieri leaped
out, and a scene ensued which placed him in a very characteristic
light, and which enables us to see him as it were in person. When the
patriots had read the passports, he seized them, and, as he says,
"full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my
passion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook
my passport in my hand, and shouted at the top of my voice, 'Look!
Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale,
red hair; I am he; look at me: I have my passport, and I have had it
legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pass, and, by
Heaven, we _will_ pass!'"

They passed, and two days later the authorities that had approved
their passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that
Alfieri had left behind him in Paris, and declared him and the
countess--both foreigners--to be refugee aristocrats!

He established himself again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth
year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of
that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek
alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of
Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so
polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of
the first two acts.

Alfieri's remaining years were spent in study and the revision of
his works, to the number of which he added six comedies in 1800. The
presence and domination of the detested French in Florence embittered
his life somewhat; but if they had not been there he could never have
had the pleasure of refusing to see the French commandant, who had a
taste for literary people if not for literature, and would fain have
paid his respects to the poet. He must also have found consolation
in the thought that if the French had become masters of Europe, many
kings had been dethroned, and every tyrant who wore a crown was in a
very pitiable state of terror or disaster.

Nothing in Alfieri's life was more like him than his death, of which
the Abbate di Caluso gives a full account in his conclusion of the
poet's biography. His malady was gout, and amidst its tortures he
still labored at the comedies he was then writing. He was impatient at
being kept in-doors, and when they added plasters on the feet to
the irksomeness of his confinement, he tore away the bandages that
prevented him from walking about his room. He would not go to bed, and
they gave him opiates to ease his anguish; under their influence his
mind was molested by many memories of things long past. "The studies
and labors of thirty years," says the Abbate, "recurred to him, and
what was yet more wonderful, he repeated in order, from memory, a good
number of Greek verses from the beginning of Hesiod, which he had read
but once. These he said over to the Signora Contessa, who sat by his
side, but it does not appear, for all this, that there ever came to
him the thought that death, which he had been for a long time used to
imagine near, was then imminent. It is certain at least that he made
no sign to the contessa though she did not leave him till morning.
About six o'clock he took oil and magnesia without the physician's
advice, and near eight he was observed to be in great danger, and the
Signora Contessa, being called, found him in agonies that took away
his breath. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, and going to the
bed, leaned upon it, and presently the day was darkened to him, his
eyes closed and he expired. The duties and consolations of religion
were not forgotten, but the evil was not thought so near, nor haste
necessary, and so the confessor who was called did not come in time."
D'Azeglio relates that the confessor arrived at the supreme moment,
and saw the poet bow his head: "He thought it was a salutation, but it
was the death of Vittorio Alfieri."

II

I once fancied that a parallel between Alfieri and Byron might be
drawn, but their disparities are greater than their resemblances, on
the whole. Both, however, were born noble, both lived in voluntary
exile, both imagined themselves friends and admirers of liberty,
both had violent natures, and both indulged the curious hypocrisy of
desiring to seem worse than they were, and of trying to make out a
shocking case for themselves when they could. They were men who hardly
outgrew their boyishness. Alfieri, indeed, had to struggle against so
many defects of training that he could not have reached maturity in
the longest life; and he was ruled by passions and ideals; he hated
with equal noisiness the tyrants of Europe and the Frenchmen who
dethroned them.

When he left the life of a dissolute young noble for that of tragic
authorship, he seized upon such histories and fables as would give the
freest course to a harsh, narrow, gloomy, vindictive, and declamatory
nature; and his dramas reproduce the terrible fatalistic traditions of
the Greeks, the stories of Oedipus, Myrrha, Alcestis, Clytemnestra,
Orestes, and such passages of Roman history as those relating to
the Brutuses and to Virginia. In modern history he has taken such
characters and events as those of Philip II., Mary Stuart, Don Garzia,
and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi. Two of his tragedies are from the
Bible, the Abel and the Saul; one, the Rosmunda, from Longobardic
history. And these themes, varying so vastly as to the times, races,
and religions with which they originated, are all treated in the same
spirit--the spirit Alfieri believed Greek. Their interest comes from
the situation and the action; of character, as we have it in the
romantic drama, and supremely in Shakespeare, there is scarcely
anything; and the language is shorn of all metaphor and picturesque
expression. Of course their form is wholly unlike that of the romantic
drama; Alfieri holds fast by the famous unities as the chief and
saving grace of tragedy. All his actions take place within twenty-four
hours; there is no change of scene, and so far as he can master that
most obstinate unity, the unity of action, each piece is furnished
with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of
time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover,
and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible
and abhorrent to him.

Emiliani-Giudici, the Italian critic, writing about the middle of
our century, declares that when the fiery love of freedom shall have
purged Italy, the Alfierian drama will be the only representation
worthy of a great and free people. This critic holds that Alfieri's
tragical ideal was of such a simplicity that it would seem derived
regularly from the Greek, but for the fact that when he felt
irresistibly moved to write tragedy, he probably did not know even the
names of the Greek dramatists, and could not have known the structure
of their dramas by indirect means, having read then only some
Metastasian plays of the French school; so that he created that ideal
of his by pure, instinctive force of genius. With him, as with the
Greeks, art arose spontaneously; he felt the form of Greek art by
inspiration. He believed from the very first that the dramatic poet
should assume to render the spectators unconscious of theatrical
artifice, and make them take part with the actors; and he banished
from the scene everything that could diminish their illusion; he would
not mar the intensity of the effect by changing the action from
place to place, or by compressing within the brief time of the
representation the events of months and years. To achieve the unity of
action, he dispensed with all those parts which did not seem to him
the most principal, and he studied how to show the subject of the
drama in the clearest light. In all this he went to the extreme, but
he so wrought "that the print of his cothurnus stamped upon the field
of art should remain forever singular and inimitable. Reading his
tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how
he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more
distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two
links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more
achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy
reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the
Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic
creations of any literature." Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the
literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of
this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would
have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way
before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of
originality of feeling and conception. "Tragedy, born sublime,
terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were,
redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, reassumed the masculine, athletic forms
of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost
ministry."

I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his
acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to
write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of
Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for
his obligation to them. A less mechanical conception of the Greek idea
than his would have prevented its application to historical subjects.
In Alfieri's Brutus the First, a far greater stretch of imagination is
required from the spectator in order to preserve the unities of time
and place than the most capricious changes of scene would have asked.
The scene is always in the forum in Rome; the action occurs within
twenty-four hours. During this limited time, we see the body of
Lucretia borne along in the distance; Brutus harangues the people with
the bloody dagger in his hand. The emissaries of Tarquin arrive and
organize a conspiracy against the new republic; the sons of Brutus are
found in the plot, and are convicted and put to death.

III

But such incongruities as these do not affect us in the tragedies
based on the heroic fables; here the poet takes, without offense,
any liberty he likes with time and place; the whole affair is in his
hands, to do what he will, so long as he respects the internal harmony
of his own work. For this reason, I think, we find Alfieri at his best
in these tragedies, among which I have liked the Orestes best, as
giving the widest range of feeling with the greatest vigor of action.
The Agamemnon, which precedes it, and which ought to be read first,
closes with its most powerful scene. Agamemnon has returned from Troy
to Argos with his captive Cassandra, and Aegisthus has persuaded
Clytemnestra that her husband intends to raise Cassandra to the
throne. She kills him and reigns with Aegisthus, Electra concealing
Orestes on the night of the murder, and sending him secretly away with
Strophius, king of Phocis.

In the last scene, as Clytemnestra steals through the darkness to her
husband's chamber, she soliloquizes, with the dagger in her hand:

It is the hour; and sunk in slumber now
Lies Agamemnon. Shall he nevermore
Open his eyes to the fair light? My hand,
Once pledge to him of stainless love and faith,
Is it to be the minister of his death?
Did I swear that? Ay, that; and I must keep
My oath. Quick, let me go! My foot, heart, hand--
All over I tremble. Oh, what did I promise?
Wretch! what do I attempt? How all my courage
Hath vanished from me since Aegisthus vanished!
I only see the immense atrocity
Of this, my horrible deed; I only see
The bloody specter of Atrides! Ah,
In vain do I accuse thee! No, thou lovest
Cassandra not. Me, only me, thou lovest,
Unworthy of thy love. Thou hast no blame,
Save that thou art my husband, in the world!
Of trustful sleep, to death's arms by my hand?
And where then shall I hide me? O perfidy!
Can I e'er hope for peace? O woful life--
Life of remorse, of madness, and of tears!
How shall Aegisthus, even Aegisthus, dare
To rest beside the parricidal wife
Upon her murder-stained marriage-bed,
Nor tremble for himself? Away, away,--
Hence, horrible instrument of all my guilt
And harm, thou execrable dagger, hence!
I'll lose at once my lover and my life,
But never by this hand betrayed shall fall
So great a hero! Live, honor of Greece
And Asia's terror! Live to glory, live
To thy dear children, and a better wife!
--But what are these hushed steps? Into these rooms
Who is it comes by night? Aegisthus?--Lost,
I am lost!

_Aegisthus._ Hast thou not done the deed?

_Cly._ Aegisthus----

_Aeg._ What, stand'st thou here, wasting thyself in
tears?
Woman, untimely are thy tears; 't is late,
'T is vain, and it may cost us dear!

_Cly._ Thou here?
But how--woe's me, what did I promise thee!
What wicked counsel--

_Aeg._ Was it not thy counsel?
Love gave it thee and fear annuls it--well!
Since thou repentest, I am glad; and glad
To know thee guiltless shall I be in death.
I told thee that the enterprise was hard,
But thou, unduly trusting in the heart,
That hath not a man's courage in it, chose
Thyself thy feeble hands to strike the blow.
Now may Heaven grant that the intent of evil
Turn not to harm thee! Hither I by stealth
And favor of the darkness have returned
Unseen, I hope. For I perforce must come
Myself to tell thee that irrevocably
My life is dedicated to the vengeance
Of Agamemnon.

He appeals to her pity for him, and her fear for herself; he reminds
her of Agamemnon's consent to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and goads
her on to the crime from which she had recoiled. She goes into
Agamemnon's chamber, whence his dying outcries are heard:--

O treachery!
Thou, wife? O headens, I die! O treachery!

Clytemnestra comes out with the dagger in her hand:

The dagger drips with blood; my hands, my robe,
My face--they all are wet with blood. What vengeance
Shall yet be taken for this blood? Already
I see this very steel turned on my breast,
And by whose hand!

The son whom she forebodes as the avenger of Agamemnon's death passes
his childhood and early youth at the court of Strophius in Phocis. The
tragedy named for him opens with Electra's soliloquy as she goes to
weep at the tomb of their father:--

Night, gloomy, horrible, atrocious night,
Forever present to my thought! each year
For now two lusters I have seen thee come,
Clothed on with darkness and with dreams of blood,
And blood that should have expiated thine
Is not yet spilt! O memory, O sight!
Upon these stones I saw thee murdered lie,
Murdered, and by whose hand!...
I swear to thee,
If I in Argos, in thy palace live,
Slave of Aegisthus, with my wicked mother,
Nothing makes me endure a life like this
Saving the hope of vengeance. Far away
Orestes is; but living! I saved thee, brother;
I keep myself for thee, till the day rise
When thou shalt make to stream upon yon tomb
Not helpless tears like these, but our foe's blood.

While Electra fiercely muses, Clytemnestra enters, with the appeal:

_Cly._ Daughter!

_El._ What voice! Oh Heaven, thou here?

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Modern Italian PoetsbyW. D. Howells

Part 1 out of 6

Modern Italian Poets
by
W. D. Howells